THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

Who put the ad in adversity?

It wasn’t me, I assure you and it wasn’t the advertising community either. They are running scared and who can blame them.You’ve seen the carnage first hand.

You’ve walked into your favorite Lowe’s and found the aisles curiosly empty. You made a last minute reservation at the hottest restaurant in town and for the first time you weren’t laughed at. And the most troubling of all indicators are the gas prices. If the Saudis and OPEC can’t maintain high margin prices, who can?

The publicly held media companies are acting as if they were living in a post-apocalyptic society where all rhyme and reason have broken down and all that’s left are the typical and predictable cost-cutting, budget slashing tactics. Movies have been made, consumer products produced, services have been rendered - so how in the world are they going to sell their stuff with the entire blood letting going on in the ad world?

Not advertising is not the answer. Smart advertising is.

I know what you’re thinking. Here is where Centric gets on its high horse and urges all TV advertisers to get with it. You know, hire us to engage the end users directly and forego the shotgun approach where 8 out of 10 viewers couldn’t remember your message if they had a gun pointed at their heads. Nope, that’s not where I am going. At least not directly.

I have friends in Gannett’s advertising division who say that the first thing they were greeted with last week was the CEO’s unselfish gesture of voluntarily cutting his salary by $200,000. Of course he makes $1.2 million, but that’s irrelevant. What’s important was the companywide shiver that touched everyone below the CEO’s pay grade. Which, by the way, were all 46,100 employees.

But Gannett has it both ways. They have both an advertising and a publishing division. They actually have a clue and a reason to be optimistic. Instead of running from reality, Gannett is actually beefing up its online units with a new mandate. They are hiring hybrids; those who understand and can sell new applications across all of their properties. A sort of new ad community, they say. And, their little known and frequently misunderstood ad company, Pointroll is going even further. And, yes, they are incorporating social media and widgets to their offerings.

Is it a solution for all across the board? No, of course not. But, it’s s a cool and rational approach to the seachange we are all seeing take place at amazing and unexpected speed.

So, unlike the fictional invasion of murderous Triffids, we are not facing extinction. At least not those of  us in the business who have the abilty to change.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Ruminations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.